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The top of the west façade of the U.S. Supreme Court Building (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When a litigant files a certiorari petition in the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking review of a lower court decision, the opposing party has 30 days to file a response. The Supreme Court Clerk’s office can and does grant extensions of time to file a response when counsel for the opposing party sets out “specific reasons why an extension of time is justified.” But one should reasonably expect complete candor from attorneys, particularly federal government attorneys, when requesting such extensions. Events this week call into question whether the United States is being completely candid in explaining its extension requests.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit last May handed the federal government a major victory when it largely rejected First Amendment challenges to the new federal law that strictly regulates the labeling of tobacco products. The tobacco industry filed a Supreme Court certiorari petition in October, and the federal government’s brief in response to the petition was initially due on November 26, 2012. Since then, the Solicitor General’s Office has sought and received three successive extensions of time to respond, first to December 26, then to February 1, and then (in response to a request submitted just this week) to March 8. On all three occasions, the “specific reason” proffered for seeking an extension was that the government attorney assigned to the case was busy attending to other legal matters.